


nothing but dreams inside

by imagines



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Hallucinations, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Post-Kerberos, Psychological Torture, Sensory Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-01 17:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15779085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagines/pseuds/imagines
Summary: The Galra make him see Keith. (Sheith Angst WeekDay 2: Hallucinations.)





	nothing but dreams inside

_i'm trying to blow out the pilot light_  
_i'm trying to[blow out the light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJJpRl2cTJc)_

They make him kill. They make him bleed. They make him crack and scream, and just when he’s ready to give up and die—

They make him see Keith.

Injected with something that burns his veins and leaves him in a stupor, floating naked in an anti-gravity isolation tank, Shiro tries to count the seconds in his head. He keeps losing count in the mid-forties. It’s more upsetting to discover that he can’t keep track of time, and he stops trying. So he can’t say how long it takes for the visions to begin.

Before they put him in here, they’d stuck wires to his head, but he can’t feel them anymore. Is it because of the drug, or the darkness, or the silence? His body has dissolved from around his soul. It occurs to him that he might be imagining his own existence, time melting and folding into a fantasy.

“Hey,” Keith says. “You come here often?”

His voice is like a rope flung to a drowning man, and Shiro clings to it, gasping. “Are you real?”

There’s anguish in Keith’s smile. “Come on, Shiro, you have to know the answer to that.”

“I don’t,” Shiro pleads. “I don’t know anything. Just tell me, please?”

“I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”

Shiro’s not going to think about why that’s the case. “Can you touch me?”

“Of course I can.” Keith puts his arms around Shiro’s waist, pressing his cheek to Shiro’s chest. He’s warm, and he’s solid. But he smells like dust and lightning, ephemeral as a storm in the desert. Shiro blinks once, and he’s drowning in the blackout again.

He thinks he screams. Except they’ve done something to his ears, and he can’t hear his own voice. Since he’d been able to hear Keith speaking, that must mean he’d imagined the whole thing.

It doesn’t matter, though. All he wants is to see Keith, even if it’s not really happening.

“Remember when I kissed you?” Keith’s back is turned this time, as if Shiro’s mind wants to be certain it remembers all angles.

“I remember.”

“Did you like it?”

It had been the night before the launch, during one last stargazing trip in the desert. Keith’s kiss had been quick and light, and Shiro’s pretty sure it had startled Keith as much as it had Shiro. He’d tried not to think about it afterward, assuming it was just the circumstances and an overflowing of emotion. Keith shouldn’t be held responsible. But had Shiro liked it? “Hard to say.”

Keith turns around and pokes Shiro in the chest with one forefinger. “You’re dodging the question. We need to talk about it when you come home.”

“We’ll talk. I promise. If I come home.”

“When you come home,” Keith repeats. Shiro’s mental picture of Keith has more faith than Shiro does. “You have to find a way to live through this. Come back, Shiro. I’m waiting just like I said I would.”

“You shouldn’t wait. I don’t know who’s coming back to you.”

Keith’s eyes blaze purple and gold, and he stands straight and tall, regal as a king. “Whoever he is, he’ll be _you_. And I’ll love you as much as ever.”

Shock lodges like a bullet in Shiro’s heart. “You love—”

There are hands on him now, not Keith’s. There are chains on his wrists and ankles, and a gag shoved into his mouth, as his body remakes itself back into reality. There is pain: his eyes can’t take the bright light, and his legs nearly give way when they shove him to his feet. They make him walk anyway.

“Put him back in his cell until the next fight,” someone snarls. “We’ve got what we need for the project.”

_I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know…I’ll love you as much as ever._

When had he begun to know the strength of Keith’s feelings? Hallucination or not, Keith turning up has relit the fading flame inside Shiro. In the half-light of the cramped, barred room they’ve stuck him in, Shiro decides he’ll do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to get back to Keith. He’ll kill, and he’ll bleed, and he’ll crack and he’ll scream. He will do everything but die.

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me [on tumblr](https://belovedsheith.tumblr.com) <3


End file.
